TechCrunch’s Found podcast, which has brought listeners the stories behind the startups since April 2022, released its final episode today. I’ve been one of the hosts of Found since November 2022 and in that time have spoken to more than 75 founders about the startups they are building. These founders hail from many different backgrounds
Month: December 2024
Conservatives critical of Elon Musk are accusing the platform he owns of censoring them, CNN reports. Political activist Laura Loomer sparked an online debate within the Right about work visas known as H-1Bs, which Musk supports. Loomer now claims her account has been unverified and demonetized, accusing Musk of being a “free speech fraud.” Meanwhile,
One last mega-deal closed out an eventful 2024. On Tuesday, World Wide Technology (WWT), a tech services company based in St. Louis, announced it has agreed to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in a deal that values the latter at $1.8 billion CAD (~$1.25 billion). The deal, which is all-cash, was unanimously approved by Softchoice’s
Asset management firm Fidelity slashed the estimated worth of its stake in business messaging platform Gupshup by another 7.7% last month, lowering the value of its holding in the SaaS startup by a total of more than 65% since its investment in mid-2021. One of the funds operated by the U.S. asset manager valued its
French food delivery startup Epicery will cease operations Tuesday, after one last holiday season hurrah for its clients and the local food businesses that were using the platform during its nine years in business in exchange for a 25% commission. In a message announcing the decision to customers earlier this month, Epicery’s team said that
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog, has opened an investigation into whether IBM’s planned acquisition of cloud software vendor HashiCorp would affect competition. The CMA said Monday it was inviting comment on the merger from interested parties by January 16. The regulator set a provisional February 25 deadline to decide whether
TikTok parent company ByteDance has big plans to buy Nvidia chips in 2025 — despite U.S. restrictions. ByteDance plans to spend $7 billion on the chips in 2025, according to reporting from The Information, citing inside sources. If ByteDance follows through, it will become one of the world’s top owners of Nvidia chips, despite U.S. efforts
AI holds huge promise for healthcare, but not just on the medical side; many startups are convinced machine learning-based systems can do a lot of good on adjacent tasks such as appointment scheduling and confirmations. Brazilian startup Carecode is among these AI believers. It’s coming out of stealth with an ambition to reduce healthcare costs
Apple is allowing anyone to access its Apple TV+ streaming service for free this weekend, from January 3 to 5. The company made the announcement on Monday alongside a short video featuring its most popular TV shows, including “Severance,” “Slow Horses,” “Shrinking,” and more. It’s worth noting that this is the first time that Apple
Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli startup that helps manage and optimize AI hardware infrastructure. As part of the merger, Run:ai said its software, which currently only works with Nvidia products, will be open sourced, meaning Nvidia rivals like AMD and Intel will be able to adapt it for their hardware. “We
Bench, the VC-backed accounting startup that left thousands of customers locked out of their accounts after it suddenly shut down last week, will be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute deal, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The San Francisco-based HR tech company Employer.com focuses on payroll and onboarding, in contrast to Bench,
While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI. While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as
A business built around increasingly customized ready-to-eat meals has netted Middle Eastern startup Calo a sizeable funding injection as it looks to expand both what it can offer its time-strapped customers and where it delivers its growing range of just-heat-to-eat dishes. The meal delivery market in the Middle East will hit $11.2 billion by 2030,
The proliferation of data centers aiming to meet the computational needs of AI could be bad news for the US power grid, according to a new report in Bloomberg. Using the 1 million residential sensors tracked by Whisker Labs, along with market intelligence data from DC Byte, Bloomberg found that more than half of the
It has been a busy year in the private equity realm, with countless big-money acquisitions unfolding. The take-private space specifically has seen some sizable transactions, with private equity firms spearheading more than a dozen billion-dollar deals for public tech companies. London-headquartered Permira was a key protagonist, joining Blackstone to acquire European online classifieds group Adevinta
CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told Google employees that 2025 will be a “critical” year for the company. CNBC reports that it obtained audio from a December 18 strategy meeting where Pichai and other executives put on ugly holiday sweaters and laid out their priorities for the coming year. “I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai
Attorneys representing President-elect Donald Trump have asked the Supreme Court to pause a law that would force TikTok-owner ByteDance to sell the short-form video app or see it banned from the United States. If the app isn’t sold, the ban is set to take effect in just a few weeks, on January 19. ByteDance is
Encode, the nonprofit organization that co-sponsored California’s ill-fated SB 1047 AI safety legislation, has requested permission to file an amicus brief in support of Elon Musk’s injunction to halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company. In a proposed brief submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Friday afternoon, counsel for
If there was one phrase that captured the vibe and theme of 2024 — at least in the transportation sector — it was “business whiplash.” Legacy automakers changed direction on their all-EVs-or-bust strategy, startups pivoted, and some Silicon Valley VCs and executives adjusted their views on a changing political landscape in which they now are
Bench, a Canada-based accounting startup that offered software-as-a-service for small and medium businesses, has abruptly shut down, according to a notice posted on its website. “We regret to inform you that as of December 27, 2024, the Bench platform will no longer be accessible,” the notice reads. “We know this news is abrupt and may
From AI advancements and CrowdStrike’s crash to WordPress drama and which startups VCs have their eyes on next, TechCrunch’s Equity podcast is saying goodbye to 2024 with a look back at the year’s biggest stories in tech. Listen to the full episode to hear hosts Kirsten Korosec, Margaux MacColl, Devin Coldewey and Anthony Ha dig
ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI’s developer-facing API were down on Thursday for more than four hours. OpenAI says it started experiencing a major outage at 11 a.m. PT, but now says its services are slowly coming back online as of 3:16 p.m. PT. Frequent users of ChatGPT may recall that the service went down earlier this
Indian online pharmacy PharmEasy is now being valued at about $456 million after its investor Janus Henderson said in a filing that it valued its stake of 12.9 million shares in the startup at $766,043. The asset manager’s Global Research Fund had originally spent $9.4 million to acquire these shares. This valuation is 92% less
Social network Bluesky said on Christmas that it is testing a trending topics view. The trending topics are visible both on the desktop and mobile apps of the social network for users across the world. On the desktop, you can see trending topics on the right sidebar, and on the mobile apps, you can tap
AMD has its work cut out for it at CES 2025. Competitor Nvidia has been sucking the oxygen out of every room it graces, as the chipmaker remains at the forefront of the AI boom. So, how will AMD compete with Nvidia’s reported RTX 5000 announcement? The company should show of its own next-gen GPU.
OpenAI has recently explored building its own humanoid robot, according to The Information. The report cites “two people with direct knowledge” of those conversations. The ChatGPT maker has been involved in the space for some time now, by way of financial backing. It has thus far invested in Figure and 1X, along with the “general
In an era where it has become tougher to raise venture capital, many companies have turned to non-dilutive, revenue-based financing (RBF) as an alternative. As a result, plenty of startups have risen to meet that challenge, none more so than in the MENA region, which has taken to the model like a duck to water.
A year after Onyx Motorbikes owner James Khatiblou died suddenly, leaving customers with unfulfilled orders and millions in unpaid debts, the brand has been revived by its original founder. “I’m excited to announce I have resurrected my original brand Onyx with incredible backers!” founder Tim Seward wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “Onyx is
Sony knows how to put on a show at CES. The company’s pressers are high-octane, star-studded affairs, as these things go. In addition to standard Sony fare like TVs and audio systems, there’s always a curve ball or two, be it a car, a drone, or a “Gran Turismo” movie. That’s one of the perks
People with chronic kidney disease, or those at risk of heart failure, are greatly affected by potassium imbalances in the body. These can even be life-threatening. While wearable glucose monitors are now commonplace and have transformed the lives of diabetes patients, potassium monitoring is in its infancy as it’s hard to do. Now, startups are
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